AI The December wind bit through Rory’s thrifted leather jacket as she crunched across Richmond Park’s frost-bitten grass, her shoulder-length black hair whipping into her eyes. Slung over one arm was the insulated thermal bag she used for her Golden Empress delivery shifts, crumpled receipt sticking out the zip, a leftover spring roll rolling around the bottom that she’d forgotten to throw away after her last run that morning. The crescent scar on her left wrist, the one she’d earned falling off her childhood bike in Cardiff, itched like mad, a sure sign magic was close. Ahead of her, Isolde’s silver hair, waist-length and fine as thistledown, glowed faint against the gray London dusk, the half-Fae’s boots never leaving a print in the frost even when Rory’s own scuffed sneakers sank an inch into the ice. Beside Rory, Nyx stretched to their full 6’2”, their shadowy form bleeding a little into the dimness between bare oak trees, their faintly glowing violet eyes fixed on the pair of ancient standing stones half a mile ahead, the boundary to Isolde’s grove.
“Your heartstone’s warmer, isn’t it?” Nyx’s voice curled around her like wind through a keyhole, the same whispery timbre they’d had since Rory first met them six months prior, when they’d slipped out of the shadow under her bed above Silas’ bar to warn her Evan had tracked her to London. Rory fumbled with the silver chain around her neck, pulling the thumbnail-sized crimson gem out from under her shirt. It glowed faint, warm as a held mug against her palm, pulsing in time with her own heartbeat. She’d had it for three weeks, left on her doorstep with no note, and it had only grown stronger as they’d neared the park.
“Burns, almost,” she said, tucking it back against her chest. Isolde paused at the base of the first standing stone, the oak trunk gnarled and carved with Fae runes Rory couldn’t parse, and turned, her pale lavender eyes sharp. “The rift bleeds from Hel, little seer’s apprentice. The stone knows the scent of its home.” Isolde never spoke straight, never could, the Fae compulsion binding her to truth even as she wrapped it in riddles. Rory had learned to parse it, mostly: the rift was a tear in the Veil, the metaphysical barrier that kept Earth separate from the realms of the Fae and the dead, and it had opened right at the edge of the grove, the Veil already thin as old paper with the winter solstice three days away.
Isolde stepped between the two standing stones first, and Rory followed, the frost vanishing from her boots the second she cleared the stone’s threshold. The London cold peeled off her like a shed skin, replaced by warm, heady air that smelled of jasmine and ripe figs, of cut grass and honey. The distant hum of the A3, the wail of sirens that had followed them through the park, cut off so completely it might never have existed. Under her boots, bluebells and poppies tangled with clover, wildflowers that didn’t bloom in December, that barely grew in London at all, springing back under her weight like they’d never been stepped on. She glanced down at Isolde’s feet as the half-Fae started walking again, and even in the grove’s soft moss, she left no mark, the grass flattening only to rise again the second her weight lifted, no footprint to trace. Rory’s boots left deep, damp prints behind her; Nyx, made of living shadow, didn’t even bend a blade.
“Time works different here,” Nyx said, as Rory fumbled her phone out of her pocket, the screen lighting up to read 2:17AM, battery at 100% when it had been at 12% and 4:02PM ten minutes prior. She huffed, shoving it back, she’d long stopped trying to make mortal tech work around magic. “An hour in here can be a day outside, or a minute. The grove hoards its own time, keeps the mortal world’s hurry from leeching it dry.” Isolde nodded, her silver hair swaying as she walked, leading them deeper into the trees. “The grove keeps its secrets close. What is yours to borrow, you may take. What is its to keep, you will never touch.”
They walked for what felt like twenty minutes to Rory, the grove’s twilight sky never dimming, the stream they crossed singing with chimes where water ran over smooth stones, birds with feathers that glowed like mother of pearl calling from the branches in notes that sounded like flutes. It was wondrous, alien, the kind of thing Rory would have thought was a fever dream a year prior, before Evan’s abuse had forced her to flee Cardiff, before Eva had introduced her to the hidden supernatural world humming under London’s skin. But the wonder curdled into unease when the air ahead dropped, sharp and cold, the sweet scent of the grove replaced by the rich, heavy smell of spiced wine and roast pork, of overripe grapes and vanilla, so thick it made her mouth water even as her skin prickled.
Her heartstone burst into flame against her chest, so hot she yelped, yanking it out to see the crimson gem glowing so bright it lit up the trees around her, pulsing so hard it throbbed in time with her pulse . The Fae-forged blade Isolde had given her a month prior, the slender moonsilver leaf-shaped dagger she’d tucked into her jacket pocket, grew icy cold in her hand when she wrapped her fingers around it, its faint luminescence flaring to a bright silver glow that cut through the amber light that was now seeping through the trees ahead.
They stepped into a small clearing, and there it was: a tear in the air, a shimmering distortion that wavered like heat haze off asphalt, the rift in the Veil. Through it, Rory could see another world, its sky a warm, hazy amber, sprawling vineyards that stretched to the horizon, their grapes glowing gold, grand white marble pavilions draped in silk , the sound of laughter and clinking cutlery drifting through the rift. That was Dymas, the realm of Hel ruled by Belphegor, the plane of gluttony and excess Isolde had told her about, the place her heartstone had originated from. A leaf drifted from the oak above Rory’s head, spiraling toward the rift, and it turned brown and crumbled to ash before it could touch the shimmering surface, making her take an involuntary step back.
A woman pressed her palms to the other side of the Veil a second later, her hands worn and raw, her face pale under a smudge of flour, her eyes desperate. “Please,” she called, her voice thin as thread, “you have to seal it. Belphegor’s been waiting for the solstice, he’s going to pour through, turn all your London into another feast ground. I’ve been trapped here seventy years, I was a seamstress, I ate a bad canape at a Christmas party and woke up in his kitchens, I can’t leave, can’t stop cooking, can’t stop eating, I can’t let him do that to anyone else.” Rory lifted a hand, wanting to reach for her, but Isolde’s cold fingers wrapped around her scarred left wrist, holding her back.
“To touch the bleed is to become the bleed,” Isolde said, her voice sharp, no riddles for once, the Fae compulsion forcing her to speak the plain truth for the first time Rory had ever heard. “Dymas does not only consume food. It consumes the unmoored, the hungry, the grieving. It would take you before you could blink.” Nyx shifted, their shadow form stretching out to stand between Rory and the rift, their violet eyes glowing bright enough to cut through the amber light from Dymas. “The rift’s growing. If we don’t seal it before solstice, the Veil tears all along the Thames. Millions of people trapped here, same as her.”
The woman pulled back, vanishing into the crowd of feasting souls that drifted behind her in Dymas, and Isolde led Rory and Nyx away from the rift, deeper into the grove, to a small stone cottage tucked between two ancient oaks, its yard full of herbs Rory couldn’t name, a small reflecting pool in front of its steps. Rory knelt by the pool, its surface so still it was like glass, and gasped when she saw what it reflected: not the grove’s twilight sky, but every realm, the spires of the Fae Courts glinting in the distance, the smoke of Hel’s other realms rising on the horizon, the lights of London stretching across the pool’s far end. Her own reflection stared back, her bright blue eyes wide, the crescent scar on her wrist plain, but next to that reflection was another: her, in a barrister’s robe, standing outside Cardiff Crown Court, a wedding ring on her left hand, the life she would have had if she’d stayed in pre-law, if she’d never left Evan.
“Is that real?” she whispered, and Nyx knelt beside her, their shadowy form dipping low enough that their reflection in the pool was not a silhouette, but a young man with brown hair and green eyes, the human sorcerer Aldric they’d been before a failed summoning in 1643 had trapped them as a Shade between realms. Rory had never seen that face , never heard them speak of what they’d been before, and her throat tightened when Nyx’s whisper brushed her ear. “I haven’t seen that in three hundred and eighty years.”
Isolde knelt on her other side, her lavender eyes soft, and spoke her familiar riddles, true as always. “All that could be is as real as all that is, until the thread of your choice cuts one loose and ties the other tight. You chose to leave the life that would have caged you. That other thread frays, while yours grows stronger. You have three days to seal the rift. Three days to keep your London, and all the souls in Dymas, from being trapped forever.”
Rory stood, tucking the moonsilver blade into her belt, the heartstone still pulsing soft and warm against her chest, no longer burning. She looked out at the grove’s wildflowers, at the rift’s faint amber glow peeking through the trees, at Nyx’s shadow form wrapping around her shoulders like a blanket to ward off the last of the cold, and nodded. She was cool-headed, quick to think outside the box, the person her friends had always relied on, and this was just another fight. One they were going to win.
“Then we’d better get started,” she said.